"It's really part of our civilisation," Dr von Frankenstein said. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us." Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, he said. "But you can't have real intelligence without an appreciation of failings. This means humor. This means stupidity.

"We're already a human-machine civilisation. Just look at your daily office cubemail, or the memetic richness of 4chan. We never got that much stupidity in the days of fax machines. Just imagine what a really stupid machine could do on Internet forums or Uncyclopedia!"

Intelligent nanobots will enter our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our nervous systems. "I'm already working on a prototype system to project virtual banana peels into the user's field of vision. With nanobot assistance, your nervous system will react as if the banana peel is real, 'slipping up' in real life. The nanobots will even broadcast their laughter into your auditory nerves, supplying your own personalised laugh track."

The nanobots would "increase our appreciation of our own stupidity. And the smarter you are, the dumber things you can do. To really fuck up, you have to rise to your own level of incompetence. Just imagine the fucked-up things nanobot hubris could lead you into. The hilarity when you look back on it waiting for your limbs to grow back!"

Dr von Frankenstein is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Psychiatric Association.